Russian plane crash kills 32 in Siberia
A Russian passenger plane crashes in Siberia shortly after taking off killing 32 of the 43 people on board. The 11 survivors are in hospital in a serious condition.
The ATR-72, a French-Italian-made twin-engine turboprop, operated by UTair was flying from Tyumen to the oil town of Surgut with 39 passengers and four crew.
The aircraft went down on a snowy field outside Tyumen, a major regional centre in Siberia.
UTair published a list of the passengers and crew, and none of them appeared to be foreigners.
The Emergency Situations Ministry said 12 survivors were flown to a hospital by helicopter, but one of them died there.
It was not immediately clear what caused the UTair airlines ATR 72 to crash with 39 passengers and four crew on board, the latest air disaster to blight Russia’s safety record.
“There are no explanations yet,” Yuri Alekhin, head of the regional branch of the Emergencies Ministry, told Russian television from the scene of the crash.
He said the “black box” flight recorder had been found and added: “Contact was lost with the plane just over three minutes after take-off.”
UTair said on its website that the twin-engine, turbo-prop plane had been trying to make an emergency landing when it came down one mile from the airport in the western Siberian city of Tyumen en route to Surgut, an oil town to the northeast.
Deadly crashes
Russia has seen a string of deadly crashes in recent years.
Some have been blamed on the use of aging Soviet-era aircraft, but industry experts point to a number of other problems, including poor crew training, crumbling airports, lax government controls and widespread neglect of safety in the pursuit of profits.
In 2010, Poland’s president and 95 other people died after their plane crashed near Smolensk, in western Russia.
In February, pilot error was blamed for another crash in central Russia that killed 44 people, including a professional hockey team.